It is necessary to strengthen the intensity and extent of European cooperation between schools, and of the mobility of school staff and learners, in order to address the priorities set out in the Agenda for European Cooperation on Schools for the 21st century, namely to improve the quality of school education in the Union in the fields of competence development and in order to improve equity and inclusion within school systems and institutions, as well as to reinforce and provide support for the teaching profession and school leadership.

(Return tabled) Question No. 422 Ms. Kirsty Duncan: With respect to nutrition in child and adolescent populations in Canada: (a) does government policy include recognition and acceptance of the principle that Canada’s children and adolescents are entitled to nutritious food (i) regardless of where they live, (ii) regardless of their family income, (iii) particularly when economic forces undermine efforts by parents and caregivers to ensure healthy eating; (b) given that the 1992 World Declaration on Nutrition, to which Canada was a signatory, states that access to nutritionally adequate and safe food is a right of each individual, what specific actions have the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Health Canada undertaken for ...[+++]children and adolescents in order to fulfill this commitment; (c) what percentage of children and adolescents in Canada is food insecure, (i) do disparities exist, including, but not limited to, disability status, ethnicity, gender, geography, socio-economic status, (ii) if so, specify; (d) what percentage of children and adolescents lives below the poverty line, (i) do disparities exist, including, but not limited to, disability status, ethnicity, gender, geography, socio-economic status, (ii) if so, specify; (e) what percentage of children and adolescents has, as a result of living below the poverty line, (i) poor nutritional status, (ii) poor health outcomes due to their poor nutritional status; (f) what percentage of members of each of the following groups is food insecure, (i) child and adolescent newcomers, (ii) children and adolescents who live in poverty, (iii) children and adolescents who live in priority neighbourhoods, (iv) Aboriginal children and adolescents; (g) what percentage of children and adolescents (i) involuntarily misses meals, (ii) lacks healthy variety in its diet; (h) does the government have information, and, if so, what is that information, concerning (i) how (g)(i) and (g)(ii) impact the caloric a ...

Improving the standard of education and training, particularly by placing the emphasis on mobility: The aim is for 3 million university students to benefit from this up to 2010, for 150 000 vocational trainees to take part in mobility schemes each year by 2013, for 10% of the school population to be involved in mobility schemes over the course of the programme and for 50 000 adults to take part in lifelong learning schemes.

Improving the standard of education and training, particularly by placing the emphasis on mobility: The aim is for 3 million university students to benefit from this up to 2010, for 150 000 vocational trainees to take part in mobility schemes each year by 2013, for 10% of the school population to be involved in mobility schemes over the course of the programme and for 50 000 adults to take part in lifelong learning schemes.

- pupils and teachers in school education for Action 1.1 (School partnerships) and Action 1.2 point 2(a), (b), (c) (Mobility actions within training partnerships for school education staff).

Centred on schools (there are more than 300 000 pre-school, primary and secondary education establishments in the Community), which are one of the main places for exchanges and contacts between the various people involved in education, and implemented by means of projects and transnational cooperation networks, Community measures in the field of education could be based on the following points: - encouraging cooperation between education establishments by means of, for example, mobility and exchanges of young people, providing them with the opportunity to ...[+++] encounter different environments; - making teachers and other people involved in education more aware of the European dimension in education during their training and, to this end, encouraging cooperation and exchanges between training institutes in different Member States; - developing language teaching, thereby increasing mobility vis-à-vis other countries and the possibility of communicating with other cultures, strengthening Community action to this end on the basis of experience acquired through the Lingua programme, and encouraging the development of teaching materials; - encouraging greater exploitation of the possibilities offered by distance education and multimedia systems to help young people adapt to occupational developments or, where necessary, retraining, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge; - promoting educational innovations and their dissemination by encouraging the establishment at European level of networks of researchers into education and training requirements and methodologies; provisions to this end are set out in the proposal for the fourth framework programme of Community activities in the field of research and technological development; - strengthening exchanges of information and experience relating to the education systems and methodologies of Member States, their reforms and innovations, and thereby profiting from the considerable knowledge acquired through the work of the ...